117 Philadelphia Avenue, Shillington, Pennsylvania
John Updike's home until he was 13 years old
● "Olinger" and "Brewster"

Shillington Poorhouse
(no longer standing)

--picture above and quote below from Updike, 
   "Fictional Houses," Architectural Digest, January 1985

"Architecture confines and defines us. Our human world speaks to us, most massively, in its buildings, and a fiction writer cannot make his characters move until he has some imaginative grasp of their environment....I can still feel the thrill of power with which, in my first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, I set characters roaming the corridors of an immense imaginary mansion I had based upon an institutional building for the poor and homeless, which had stood at the end of the street where my family had lived in Pennsylvania."

picture on right and quote below from, Updike, "The Houses of Ipswich," Architectural Digest, June 1990

26 East Street, Ipswich, Massachusetts
1958 - 1970

 ● Roger and Bea Guerin's house in Couples

"The decade was the sixties, my wife and I were youngish, and the house suited us just fine. It was Puritan; it was back-to-nature; it was less is more. A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise....The straightforward, hearth-centered architecture of our house must have strengthened our family sense. Once we moved, the fact is, things fell apart...."

Updike's apartment
151 Beacon Street, Boston
1974 - 1977

Updike moves in 1982 to a house in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, which is described, along with its flora*, fauna** and metallobioforms, in Toward the End of Time. He joins St. John's Episcopal Church (left). 

*  Truly florid flora!  A Colombian colleague, used to traversing literary rain forests, barely untangled herself from the verbal thicket.
** The house is hidden from the public roadway. Unlike Ray, Jose, Doreen and even dear Deirdre, I didn't presume to trespass or disturb the householder. (But I did see a large and frolicsome doe in the grassland park next to the Labor-in-Vain house.)

Sandstone Farmhouse

                 
          --pictures above and quote below from Updike, 
               "Fictional Houses," Architectural Digest, January 1985

The family farm near Plowville, Pennsylvania, Updike's home from age 13 until he leaves for Harvard. (His parents and maternal grandparents lived here until their respective deaths.)

"The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of The Centaur and Of the Farm; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding."

1961: Updike rents a one-room office, above 
a restaurant and overlooking the Ipswich River, 
in the Caldwell Building, South Main Street, Ipswich

Labor-in-Vain Road, Ipswich
1970 - 1974

● Ken and Foxy Whitman's house in Couples

"To describe these houses is halfway to describe the life lived in them. My Couples was originally titled Couples and Houses and Days and was all about our entry into other people’s homes, as guests and lovers."

Updike, "Fictional Houses," Architectural Digest, January 1985